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Re:Gen Magazine
Phog Masheeen
Survey of Brutality
Distort-O-Sound Records
Posted: Tuesday, June 17, 2008
By: Charity VanDeberg
Concert Editor
With a blend of painful sounds and sickening distortion, Phog Masheeen may have captured the resonance of nausea.
Mark Soden, Jr. had an inventive vision in mind when he recorded Survey of Brutality. He imagined music as art "where impressionism is applied to sound, time, and texture." He wanted to create something groundbreaking and outrageous. To accomplish this, he experimented with everything on hand until he found the most maddening, brain-drilling sound on Earth. He then combined it with the next five most annoying sounds, deconstructed, reconstructed, and added echo, distortion, and digital delay. The result, regrettably, is more dentist drill to the frontal lobe than anything resembling art. Even impressionism generally has some sort of pattern to it if you look at it from far enough away. Compared to Phog Masheeen's experimentation, public restroom scribbling is great literature. Maybe if there was some interpretive dance...
It would be easier to critique individual songs if any of them were tolerable enough to listen to all the way through, if even the first 20 seconds were not so unbearable that they cause the stomach acid to churn like boiling acrid sludge. This is not music; it is sonic torture. It would drive a monk to murder kittens. Survey of Brutality is completely un-listenable unless you are pondering a method of sound-induced bulimia or a really good temporary insanity plea. The very best part is the silence that comes when the music ends.
Heathen Harvest
Tuesday, July 01 2008 @ 12:00 AM PDT
Contributed by: Blond Adonis
Genre: Noise-art-rock
There’s nothing better than to hear new sounds with new ideas in new music; new sounds=new ideas and originality in the realm of indie music. What we have here is some psychiatric-themed, noise-machine artwork that, without singing and with what the uninitiated may hear as just plain noise is an experiment in, for one thing, tolerance; tolerance of the ears, of the brain and the psyche. Well, that’s the gist of the new CD by Phog Masheen, which is basically the project of Mark Soden, Jr., the “mastermind” who wrote it all and recorded it up in the best place on earth – the Bay Area – San Francisco, to be exact; at Gench Studios in the city.
The album, entitled Survey of Brutality is a rather short one. It starts out with the tone-setting title track and then goes through stages of one’s encounter with psych meds, e.g., “Take Your Meds”, “I Can’t Deal with You (Until the Meds Kick In)”, “The Meds Have Kicked In” and so forth. Survey…goes in and out of lucidity, using incidental sounds, distorted, warped PSAs, tape loops, etc. as well as those quirky “found sounds.” One interesting part is when Phog Masheen takes a trumpet and brutalizes it – making sounds with it that a trumpet hasn’t been heard to make before; they go through all sorts of weird experimentations with it, recording the caterwauling that emanates from it by doing things with the resonating springs, loose valve caps, and messing with the valves themselves until the unthinkably strange noises that come from messing with a brass instrument becomes a seamless part of this sonic intensity.
There are all kinds of off-putting noises and clunking, scratchy guitar clips here and there, screaming, voices in odd modulations and so on. The most understandable cut is the 36 second track, “The Angry Landlord Speaks”, wherein you hear a putative landlord haranguing his tenants about the stuff they’re not supposed to do; it sounds (under the distorted vocal) that this guy is angry because he’s had to put up with the stuff he’s bitching about for so long that he’s going to scream and make sure all these idiots know what the rules are.
If you’d like, think of Survey of Brutality as an “urban dreamscape” – an apt description. It evokes the whole aura of the inner city – unknown noises, the scrawl, the sprawl, the smells and the zombie-like atmosphere – lemmings walking around from office to over-priced junk food merchants and back to their wage-slave temp jobs, dreaming of the minute they can leave for home and then do it all over again. Maybe that is why there is such a fuel for psychotropic drugs in this day and age of abused workers who toil in deathtraps that are not physically hurtful but, worse, that sap the consciousness from the individual.
Or it could just be one man’s inner-noise-fantasy demons and this is just one interpretation of it. But either way it’s a unique addition to the sonic intensities of up and coming indie artists that screw the old and tired pop music format
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